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Op-ed Placement

Keep the Bureaucrats Out of Preschool

Early childhood schooling has become an increasingly important element of the national debate over the federal government’s role in education. The years before kindergarten can have a strong influence on our children’s development into productive members of society. With this in mind, President Obama has prioritized Race to the Top and the creation of a federally funded, universal preschool program. In his budget proposal for 2015, the president requested a whopping $750 million for his pet project.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen time and time again. Central planners who think they know better than parents assure us that education can be improved by throwing more money at it. They claim that more universality and more federal control will somehow make our children smarter.

The trouble is, like so many items of liberal mythology, the evidence doesn’t support these conclusions. Every federal education program to date, from No Child Left Behind to Head Start to Common Core, has been an abject failure.

Let’s start with the disaster that is the Head Start Program. Despite being entrenched in federal bureaucracy for nearly half a century, this early childhood education program fails by its own admission to produce measurable results by third grade. Independent analyses of Head Start have found similar results.

Progressives are quick to counter that more money, along with more rigorous federal standards, will solve the problem. Apparently the $180 billion that Head Start already received is not enough. While so-called “high quality” preschool programs in Boston, New Jersey and Tulsa claim to achieve very strong results, there are serious methodological flaws with the studies used to evaluate these programs. A very similar program in Tennessee, using a properly randomized trial, found no such results.

In Oklahoma, where a state preschool program was enacted in 1998, taxpayers fork over an average of $7,400 per child for “free” early childhood education. What has been the result? Reading proficiency has remained unchanged over the last 20 years, while Oklahoma’s test scores have dropped from above the national average in 1998 to four points below the average today.

Democrats claim to be the party of science. The president says that he isn’t interested in partisanship, but only in doing “what works.” If that is true, then I urge them to take another look at the facts. Race to the Top, universal preschool and any other educational programs with federal standards and funding do not work.

The fact that liberals continue to aggressively push for these policies with no evidence of their value really calls into question the sincerity of those driving the issue of federal education standards. If not the kids, who stands to benefit?

Universal preschool appears to have very little to do with actual preschoolers, and more to do with expanding federal power and cozying up to teachers unions. It’s a monument to the arrogant bureaucrats who think they know more about raising your children than you do.

This worry is compounded by some of the actual provisions included in the president’s proposal, including “voluntary” home visits by social workers to check up on your children. If the White House’s definition of “voluntary” is anything like that used in the Common Core standards, acceptance will likely be tied to grant money for states. This is just another excuse to give bureaucrats more power to undermine parents’ rights.

It is well documented that the government’s track record on education is abysmal. Now they are asking families and parents to fork over more money to pay for a program that’s been proven not to work. Control over education should always remain at the local level and free from federal mandates, standards and funding. The evidence shows that children in less centrally controlled educational environments have better education outcomes.

For decades, our children have been subjected to a failed and corrupt federal education bureaucracy. We need take a stand, as parents and as American citizens, to demand a stop to more of the same. The only equality that a universal preschool program would bring to young students is an equal performance of mediocrity.

Yesterday, after months of slowly moving through the legislature, a bill to repeal Common Core education standards came to the floor of the Arizona state Senate. It wasn’t a perfect bill, but it went a long way towards removing the damaging standards and restoring state control over education from an intrusive federal government.

One of the most outrageous features of Common Core education standards is the way they pit teachers against parents. Textbooks and curricula aligned with Common Core actively discourage parental involvement in homework, and new methods for solving math problems are structured in such a way that few parents can understand them enough to help their children.

The Lowcountry Conservatives in Action in Summerville, South Carolina, have made frequent use of the "Stop Common Core" signs they received from FreedomWorks. The signs have shown up at state Board of Education meetings in Columbia, Senate Education Oversight subcommittee meetings, and local board meetings across the great Charleston area. We are really grateful to FreedomWorks for helping us fight the standards!

In New Mexico, hundreds of high school students are walking out of class in protest of the new Common Core-aligned tests just implemented in the state. This is part of larger movement nationwide by parents and students to protest the standards, while without waiting for state legislatures to act.

Common Core education standards have attracted criticism from across the political spectrum due to lack of choice and competition inherent in a top-down, federal mandate. Students succeed when parents and teachers have flexibility to tailor their education programs to individual children, celebrating rather than ignoring their differences.

The United States education system is home to many thousands of teachers. Some are good, some are less good, and some stand head and shoulders above the rest, setting an example in educational excellence that others can only hope to achieve.

When Common Core standards first passed in 2010, teachers unions were cautiously optimistic. After a glimpse of their implementation, however, that enthusiasm quickly began to sour. In 2014, the National Education Association, which once supported the standards, launched unambiguous criticism against the program, calling its rollout “completely botched.”

The massive unpopularity of Common Core education standards has served as a rallying cry for concerned parents and teachers to get involved in politics—sometimes for the first time in their lives. Nothing galvanizes grassroots activism like the realization that the government is failing our children. These efforts have been remarkably successful, with three states repealing Common Core outright last year, and many state-level bills already being introduced in the new Congress.

It’s a new year, and the state legislatures have come roaring back into session chock full of ideas to stop the Common Core education standards that are damaging school systems all across the country. Last year, we saw Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina withdraw from the standards, and 2015 looks to be off to a good start.

As one of our more than 6.7 million FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your senators today and urge them to support Senator Pat Roberts’ Learning Opportunities Created at the Local Level (LOCAL) Act “to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) to prohibit Federal education mandates, and for other purposes,” and to co-sponsor the bill if they have not already done so.